When dealing with people remember you are not
dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures
bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity. ~ Dale
Carnegie

Who has deceiv'd thee so oft as thy self? ~
Benjamin Franklin

People only see what they are prepared to see.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The longer I live the more I see
that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly
taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In truth there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.
~ GK Chesterton

But that is the way of the
scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts
with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his
achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his
accumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you point out this
miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when you call to convince
him, the servant prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists have odious
manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of
them. ~ Mark Twain

I have often
said that there is more intolerance in higher education than in all the
mountains of Tennessee.
~John
Scopes

The first principle is that you
must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. ~ Richard
Feynman

People do not believe lies
because they have to, but because they want to. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

I had one reviewer tell me that he didn't care what the
data said, he knew that what I was finding wasn't possible. I wrote back and
said, "Well, what data would convince you?' And he said, 'None.'
~ Mary Schweitzer

Scientists,
being as a rule more or less human beings, passionately stick up for their
ideas, their pet theories. It's up to someone else to show you are
wrong. ~ Niles Eldredge

These theories appeared to be
able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which
they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an
intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden
from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming
instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory.
Whatever happened always confirmed it... Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case
which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty
in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not
even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure.
"Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could
not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has
become thousand-and-one-fold." ~ Karl Popper

I want to return now to the
charge that science is just a faith. The more extreme version of that
charge—and one that I often encounter as both a scientist and a
rationalist—is an accusation of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves
as great as that found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit
of justice in this accusation. ~ Richard Dawkins

But our ways of learning about the world are
strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking
that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully
rational and objective 'scientific method,' with individual scientists as
logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology. ~
Stephen Jay Gould

It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated
mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective
truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist
faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as
we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not
happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.
~Roger Lewin

Today, our duty
is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and
explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be
encouraged to think about the weaknesses of the interpretations and
extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths.
The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to
their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the
inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs. ~ Pierre Grasse

The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a
decline in scientific integrity. This is already evident in the reckless
statements of Haeckel and in the shifty, devious and histrionic argumentation of
T. H. Huxley ... To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical
arguments are invoked even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are
engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact
and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion. ~ W.R. Thompson

In the acquisition of new knowledge,
scientists are not guided by logic and objectivity alone, but also by such
nonrational factors as rhetoric, propaganda, and personal prejudice. Scientists
do not depend solely on rational thought, and have no monopoly on it. ~
William Broad and Nicholas Wade

Curiously
enough, for all that science may be very good thing, members of the scientific
community are often dismayed to discover, like policemen, that they are not
better loved. Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain,
politically immature, and arrogant. This last is considered a special injustice.
"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain," the biologist
Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is "a much more humble enterprise than
any religion or other ideology." Yet despite the outstanding humility
of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen suspicions.
Scientists are hardly helped when one of their champions immerses himself
in the emollient of his own enthusiasm. Thus Richard Dawkins recounts the story
of his professor of zoology at Oxford, a man who had "for years...
passionately believed that the Golgi apparatus was not real." On hearing
during a lecture by a visiting American that his views were in error, "he
strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand, and said --
with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these
fifteen years.'" The story, Dawkins avows, still has the power "to
bring a lump to my throat."

It
could not have been a very considerable lump. No similar story has ever been recounted
about Richard Dawkins. Quite the contrary. He is as responsive to criticism as a
black hole in space. "It is absolutely safe to say," he has remarked,
"that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that
person is ignorant, stupid or insane." ~
David Berlinski

Consider the role science now plays in education.
Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same
manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago.
There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may
be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even
worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner.
Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions,
are criticized most severely and often most unfairly and this already at the
elementary school level. But science is excepted from the criticism. In society
at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as
the judgment of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move
towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the
wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a
clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue
this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as
oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact
that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has
nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of
our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most
severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer. ~ Paul Feyerabend

I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable
phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with
the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in
some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.
Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by
scientists. ~ Michael Crichton

I am not one of those rarefied academics who cringes at every journalistic story about science for fear that the work reported might thereby become tainted with popularity. And, in a purely “political” sense, I certainly won’t object -- if major newspapers choose to feature any result of my profession as a lead story especially, if I may be self-serving for a moment, when one of the tales reports my own work! Nonetheless, this degree of public attention for workaday results in my field (however elegantly done) does fill me with wry amusement – if only for the general reason that most of us feel a tickle in the funny bone when we note a gross imbalance between public notoriety and the true novelty or importance of an event, as when Hollywood spinmeisters manage to depict their client’s ninth marriage as the earth’s first example of true love triumphant and
permanent.